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Comment by deadfromtor | Hacker News Reader

Just FYI that HN is very anti-tor. I made this account via Tor just now to prove the point. It will be dead by default (unless someone "vouches" for it). It's a very user-hostile stance that HN takes (along with not letting you delete your account). It really makes you wonder what they're doing with all this data? Doxxing is almost a given.

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The restrictions go away after a while, and in the meantime users can vouch for the comments that aren't trolling or spam. They did exactly that for your comment here, as well as for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898410.

This seems to me a reasonable design that balances the competing concerns. I like that both of these comments turned into examples of the system working properly. It's true that they had to wait a little before getting unkilled*, but that's not "very anti-tor" nor "very user-hostile".

(* 20 minutes and 10 minutes, respectively)

> HN is very anti-tor

If by "HN" you mean the site technology and administrative policy, this is quite untrue.

I always connect by Tor (simply because I connect to everything by Tor) and never experience any problems with;

  torsocks www https://news.ycombinator.com

FWIW my account here was created over Tor, and only later when I decided the site was kosher and a relatively friendly place did I decide to add personal details. I don't post here with any illusion of anonymity, rather Tor is part of my daily dealings with the internet for a generally pro-active security stance. I trust that a tool created by the US Navy with "defending and spreading democracy" in mind is fit to defend my own needs.

I hope that like Facebook, NY Times and the BBC, we may one day see a Hacker News hidden service onion address.

That said there does seem to be a negative attitude toward Tor from certain Cloud companies that Flares up here from time to time. They seem unable to reconcile individual desires for personal privacy technologies with their business model of defending free speech from DDOS attacks. It's a complex problem but I do wish they'd try harder yo get on-board with the programme in a world where threats to clients are at least as serious as those facing service providers.

"Just FYI that HN is very anti-tor..." @deadfromtor

Citations please?

Otherwise this is horseshit. Many of HN's users signed up and access HN from tor.

I /often/ utilize the tor browser to access HN. I've not had a single issue /ever/ with that.

Or they realize that letting Tor users makes spam explode.

I created my account here using a MitM Squid SSL Bump proxy in a VPS provider and posted from that proxy for a few years. Once in a blue moon I would get rate limited, I assume because this site was being abused. AFAIK my posts were never affected by using my VPS proxies. VPS IP's and Tor exit node IP's are often treated as equally hostile by many sites but not here. I avoid Tor because every time I tried it there was just too much latency for me and I don't like someone else controlling the exit node.

I eventually stopped using the proxy here on HN not because of this site but Cloudflare and Google would grief me on so many sites that people submit here which made it hard for me to review them and submitting everything to archive.ph is time consuming. I keep the MitM proxy around in case I need to go to a very hostile website or if I want to leave a funny PTR DNS record in their logs.

> Just FYI that HN is very anti-tor. I made this account via Tor just now to prove the point. It will be dead by default (unless someone "vouches" for it).

Also, Wikipedia blanket-bans Tor because it make trivial to avoid bans and blocks.

Different poster here. This account and post were done over Tor. Let's see if this holds.

EDIT: Yup; dead on arrival.

Not dead.

it's more likely they do this to combat spamming. accounts created by Tor are more likely to be used for spam than for legitimate discussion, since Tor evades IP reputation.

I'm sure you could email @dang and ask to be un-shadow-banned, and he would do so.

Wouldn't emailing @dang be against the purpose of Tor, which is to enhance privacy?

> Wouldn't emailing @dang be against the purpose of Tor, which is to enhance privacy?

Just use webmail in your tor browser. And don't send it from your main gmail, but create a throwaway.

It's pretty hard to sign up for an email account over Tor. The closest I've seen is Protonmail, which will let you make an anonymous account in exchange for a Bitcoin payment.

disposable email services.

Neither Google search nor YouTube seem to work (other than very sporadically, presumably if they've not had chance to block an IP yet) over Tor, does GMail?

it makes you enter a captcha (not a recaptcha though oddly) and you need javascript on, but it is possible to sign in and use gmail over tor. idk about creating accounts.

Does that restriction go away after you get enough reputation? Or does every single comment need to be vouched for even after several have been posted and accumulated upvotes?

The former.

How is HN anti-tor? Everyone can read your comment. Wdym by "vouching"?

Also, HN deletes your account when you them send a mail as stated in the FAQ. It always sucks to delete accounts with user comments, as it destroys context in old threads.

As spiders crawl the web humans should consider anything they post online as undeletable. If you send HN the beforementioned, there is a chance that I can still browse your posts via archive.org or google cache.

If you're afraid of doxxing, maybe make a second thought before hitting "reply".

> Everyone can read your comment. Wdym by "vouching"?

There's "showdead" profile setting that allows you to see flagged comments, and enough "karma" allows you to vouch for hidden-by-default content.

It's one of those hidden (somewhat) features: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flaggi...

Thank you for the link, I didn't know about half of the features listed there!

most sites seem to treat Tor poorly, possibly due to abuse. well-used VPNs also can suffer from Google captchas etc. not that I like that fact, but it seems to be inescapable

Yup. Suspicious just like when reddit became hostile to Tor.

It's also a violation of the spirit of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee wrote about this in the December 2010 issue of Scientific American that any walled off website that blocks you from accessing it is unacceptable because it's not the web anymore.

For me old.reddit.com seems to work just as well with or without Tor (eg via Brave). The website served at the raw domain barely functions IME, so perhaps that's where the issue lie?

The problem is user account creation, usually.

Read-only access works pretty well in most cases (unless it is behind Cloudflare, then you're @#$%@#^%).

> unless it is behind Cloudflare, then you're @#$%@#^%

Try again, this hasn't been the case for a long time.

> Suspicious just like when reddit became hostile to Tor.

And any website using Cloudflare.

> any walled off website that blocks you from accessing it is unacceptable because it's not the web anymore.

It is a personal point of pride that LokiList allows posting over Tor. Not many clearnet sites do, especially without registration.

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